saved by the Mel

What a lovely day to be caught in the rain (or at least drizzle and fog). I've been car-sitting for a friend who's overseas for a month--I get to use the car in exchange for moving it on the alternate-side parking days. When he dropped it off my friend noted that the automatic windows were temperamental and had stopped working, leaving them stuck open. "They always start up again eventually," he assured me. Unfortunately, though, they didn't start up again, no matter how many times I tried, and by the end of the week there was heavy rain in the forecast. When the deluge began on Thursday night, I was out on the street trying to cover the windows with garbage bags and electrical tape. You can imagine how well that worked.

So today I used the car to take Bobby to a birthday party and drop Stella off at Dad's. The car wasn't totally waterlogged, fortunately, but I did get a wet behind from the seat (and so did Stella). I went to lunch at a lovely cafe in Long Island City, savoring salade nicoise, cafe au lait, and pain au chocolat, chuckling over the latest issue of The Onion, and generally clearing my head of some muck and gunk that had built up for a few days.

Afterwards I started up the car again, intending to swing by Socrates Sculpture Park. Immediately one of the best vocal renditions of all time came on WNYC: Mel Torme's "Lullaby of Broadway." I snapped my fingers, bopping and singing along, as I made my way up Jackson Avenue. At a stop sign on a side street, I idly pressed the window control button, as I had so many times the past few days in a futile attempt to get the windows to close. This time, the window went right up. I pushed the other three buttons. The other three windows went up, too!

Maybe it was driving around a bit, charging the battery. Maybe it was hitting some bump that got some shorted-out wire in the system to reconnect. But I like to think it was Mel, the Velvet Fog at his scat-cat best, filling the little car with his special brand of electricity on a foggy day in L.I.C.